I’m an ocean liner tragic. Clara and I specifically went to Melbourne for the Titanic exhibition , and to Long Beach when we were in LA to see the Queen Mary . Here’s a younger version of me on the bridge: Therefore, I consider it my responsibility to correct the record when news outlets miss the mark on this specific, niche interest. The ABC (Australia) published a history quiz today that asked: Question 8: The Titanic — then the world’s largest ocean liner — hit an iceb...

Translating errors at layer boundaries so storage details don't leak into the handler or, worse, into client responses. Translating errors at layer boundaries so storage details don't leak into the handler or, worse, into client responses.

Antarctic snow cruiser circa 1939, via Historyland . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at whether the Strait of Hormuz is open yet, building code cost benefit analysis, Intel joining Terafab, sponge cities, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran A two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran was announced earl...

Light: it's the radiation we can see. The communications potential of light is obvious, and indeed, many of the earliest forms of long-distance communication relied on it: signal fires, semaphore, heliographs. You could say that we still make extensive use of light for communications today, in the form of fiber optics. Early on, some fiber users (such as AT&T) even preferred the term "lightguide," a nice analogy to the long-distance waveguides that Bell Laboratories had experimented with. The ...

As I already mentioned in oh so many blog posts, I now live in a house, which opens totally new possibilities when doing astrophography. I no longer have to drive a long way just to get to the spot, and then spend hours either outside in the cold, or in a small shed. Now all I need is to carry out the equipment in the evening, do the setup and polar alignment when it gets acceptably dark, and then sit comfortably on the couch and control the session from the inside. Which means I can do much lon...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Meeuwsen, whose blog can be found at blog.frankmeeuwsen.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Frank. A somewhat older, bea...

I posted about using the Banach-Tarski Paradox(BT)  to explain the miracle of Loaves and Fishes (LF)  here . Darling says that whenever I fool my readers or my students then I have to tell them later, so I'll tell you now: The story about me meeting with Pope and talking about the BT Paradox (that would be a good name for a rock band: B-T-Paradox) was not true. I think my readers know that.   1) I first learned the Banach-Tarski Paradox as a grad student in 1981 when I read Hillary Putnam's a...

I was inspired by, of all things, a video monologue by a Scottish surfer [1] who said that the future for them was challenging themselves in new ways. My guitar was close by and I thought maybe I should give myself a bit of a challenge too. I picked up my guitar and looked up a tutorial on how to do finger picking. The first video I found was a bit challenging. I looked for another that was easier. The one I found was a tutorial showing how to play How did it end? by Taylor Swift, a song ...

Regular readers will know that I've been on quite the CMS journey over the years. WordPress, Grav, Jekyll, Kirby, my own little Hyde thing, and now Pure Blog . I won't bore you with the full history again, but the short version is: I kept chasing just the right amount of power and simplicity, and I think Pure Blog might actually be it. But there was one nagging thing. I have a books page that's powered by a YAML data file, which creates a running list of everything I've read with ratings,...

A Acemoglu2023 Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity . PublicAffairs, 2023, 978-1541702530. Achen2017 Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government . Princeton University Press, 2017, 978-1400888740. Adams1905 Samuel Hopkins Adams: The Great American Fraud . Collier, 1906. B Baldwin2014 Peter Baldwin: The Copyright Wars: Three Cen...

The global standing desk market reached $8.6 billion in 2025 and is on track to hit $9.1 billion in 2026, according to Global Market Insights. More than 24 million office setups worldwide now include a standing or sit-stand desk, and that number keeps climbing as hybrid work reshapes how people think about their workspaces. This article pulls together the latest user data, market figures, health research, and regional trends in one place. Standing Desk User Statistics: Key Numbers for 2026 ...

Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no topic has been more polarising than AI coding agents. What I keep noticing is that a lot of the criticism directed at these tools is perfectly legitimate, but it often comes from people without a meaningful amount of direct experience with them. They are not necessaril...

The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client 2026-04-09 18:30 I love the Fediverse. I have been on it for years, and it remains the only social network where I actually enjoy spending time. No algorithmic feed pushing outrage, no dark patterns, no surveillance capitalism. Just people talking to each other over an open protocol. But every time I wanted to recommend it to someone, I ran into the same wall: the clients are heavy. Mastodon's web interface ships megabytes of JavaScript. Elk, ...

After cobbling together my own eval for Claude , I was interested to discover harbor . It’s described as: A framework for evaluating and optimizing agents and models in container environments. Which sounds kinda cool, right? After cobbling together my own eval for Claude , I was interested to discover harbor . It’s described as: A framework for evaluating and optimizing agents and models in container environments. Which sounds kinda cool, right? After...

The newest zine from my research group, “Carol’s Causal Conundrum”, is out today! You can read it online, or print your own free copies to read offline ! This zine is an introduction to causally ordered message delivery , a fundamental abstraction for distributed programming. It’s the result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator, Ayush Manocha, and me. In the zine, we talk about what exactly causally ordered message delivery is, what problem it solves, and a...

I love sampling algorithms. Here's the sampling algorithm that I find most magical. We want to generate a subset of {1, 2, ..., n} of size k . def floyd ( n , k ): s = set () for i in range ( n - k + 1 , n + 1 ): t = random . randint ( 1 , i ) if t in s : s . add ( i ) else : s . add ( t ) return s I learned about this algorithm the canonical way all good algorithm lore ...

The Orion spacecraft with Artemis II astronauts returned to Earth on April 10 after their flyby around the Moon on April 6. Bottom left: The lunar flight crew from left to right: Mission Specialists Christina Koch & Jeremy Hansen , Pilot Victor Glover , and Commander Reid Wiseman . Images: NASA After five decades of human absence at our Moon , the four astronauts of Artemis II marveled at a stark lunar landscape on April 6 as their Orion spacecraft swung them around our cosmic com...

Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code . It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to both my profession and the fate of free democracies. Well worth seeing if you’re in the Boston area this month. Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code . It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to both my profession and the fate of free democracies. Well worth seeing if you...

inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman zach lieberman

“Gandalf, my old friend, this will be a night to remember.” ― The Lord of the Rings The next three days of my journey, I've spent in and around Twizel. This region is called the Mackenzie Basin, which includes a few popular tourist spots. It's also where my friends from Germany now live, and I was excited to see them again after a long time! On my way to Twizel, I've made a few stops. First, I've checked out the Moeraki Boulders . Fortunately, it was only a short detour, as I ...

Initially, we had languages like Fortran (1957), Pascal (1970), and C (1972). Fortran was designed for number crunching and scientific computing. Pascal was restrictive with respect to low-level access (it was deliberately “safe”, as meant for teaching structured programming). So C won out as a language that allowed low-level/unsafe programming (pointer arithmetic, direct memory access) while remaining general-purpose enough for systems work like Unix. To be fair, Pascal had descendants that...

I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the W eb A ssembly T oolkit for G o. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go. watgo comes with a CLI and a Go API to parse WAT (WebAssembly Text), validate it, and encode it into WASM binaries; it also supports decoding WASM from its binary format. At the center of it all is wasmir - a semantic representation of a WebAssembly module that users can examine (and manipulate)....

Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago . It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently "a private API preview to select users", but you can try it out today on meta.ai (Facebook or Instagram login required). Meta's self-reported benchmarks show it competitive with Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.4 on selected benchmarks, though notably behind on Terminal-Bench 2.0. Meta themselves say they "continue to invest in are...